Multitasking

Doing more than one task at a time, especially more than one complex task, takes a toll on productivity.

Although that shouldn’t surprise many people, the extent of the problem might come as a shock. Psychologists who study what happens to cognition (mental processes) when people multitask found that our brains were not designed for it.

Stanford’s professor of communication Clifford Nass, on an NPR broadcast, had clearly summarized the findings:

“The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They’re basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking… People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory.

They’re chronically distracted [but] they actually think they’re more productive… [They say,] “When I really have to concentrate, I turn off everything and I am laser-focused.” And unfortunately, they’ve developed habits of mind that make it impossible for them to be laser-focused. They’re suckers for irrelevancy. They just can’t keep on task.”

It translates into a:

• Struggle to prioritize: The never-ending change in tasks makes it difficult for us to judge which ones are important, which are urgent and which are just time-filling distractions;

• More error: The overall quality of our work plummets, which results in more manual errors or poor decision-making;

• Productivity loss: Research found that even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40% of someones productive time.

At the end multitasking makes us look and feel busy, but actually harm the quality and quantity of our initiatives.

And there are more negative side-effects: because of our brains’ plasticity, when we consistently engage in multi-tasking we reshape our brains for the worse, and we become habituated to this counterproductive way of working.